Prof. Dr. Petra Dolata

Petra Dolata is associate professor and former Canada research chair in the history of energy at the University of Calgary, Canada. She is the scholar in residence (2018–2023) at the interdisciplinary Calgary Institute for the Humanities, where she also co-convenes the Energy In Society (EIS) research group. She holds a master’s degree in American studies from Ruhr University Bochum, where she also received her PhD in international relations with a study on US-German energy relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her current research focuses on European and North American energy history after 1945 as well as the history and politics of energy transitions. She is part of a seven-year partnership project, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, on deindustrialization and the politics of our time (2020–2027). The project is based at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University and examines the historical roots and lived experience of deindustrialization as well as the political responses to it.

RCC Research Project: Energy Transitions as Lived Experience: A Transnational Study of Deindustrializing Coal Regions in Europe since 1945

Selected Publications:

• Die deutsche Kohlenkrise im nationalen und transatlantischen Kontext. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2006.

• “Complex Agency in the Great Acceleration: Women and Energy Transition in the Ruhr Area after 1945.” In A New Light: Histories of Women and Energy, edited by Abigail Harrison Moore and Ruth Sandwell, 155–173. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.

• “Sustainability in the Anthropocene: From Forests to the Globe.” In Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, edited by Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier, 37–59. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021.

• “Understanding the Recent History of Energy Security in the Arctic.” In Breaking Through: Understanding Sovereignty and Security in the Circumpolar Arctic, edited by Wilfrid Greaves and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, 185–198. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.

• “A New Canada in the Arctic? Arctic Policies under Harper.” Revue Etudes Canadiennes 78 (2015): 131–154.

• “How ‘Green’ is Canada’s Arctic Policy? The Role of the Environment and Environmental Security in the Arctic.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 32, no. 2 (2012): 65–83.